Sarah Tyrell: Profile Of Eldon Tyrell's Niece

Full name: Sarah Tyrell
Also known as: Mrs. Niemand
Species: Born to replicant parents, raised as human
Affiliation: Tyrell Corporation
Role: Heir to the Tyrell Corporation
Known for: Templant for Rachael · destruction of Tyrell Headquarters
Family: Anson Tyrell (father) · Ruth Tyrell (mother) · Rachael (twin sister) · Eldon Tyrell (uncle)
Setting: Los Angeles, Mars, Scapa Flow, and Outer Hollywood
First appearance: Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human (1995)
Status: Dead, shot herself on the Outer Hollywood rooftop set
Kills (novels): Harry Bryant · Andersson · Sebastian's rebuilt Pris · Wycliffe · Zwingli

Sarah Tyrell was the niece and heir of Eldon Tyrell in K. W. Jeter's novels Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human and Blade Runner: Replicant Night. She was the original face behind the replicant Rachael, and in 2020 she used a missing sixth replicant to draw Rick Deckard back to Los Angeles. Her plan ended with the United Nations destroying the Tyrell Corporation's headquarters, and she left Earth with Deckard under a false name. On Mars she learned that her parents had been replicants, and she shot herself on an orbital film set at Outer Hollywood.

Biography

Birth And Childhood

Sarah was born aboard Salander 3, the last private interstellar ship to fly before the U.N. banned corporate spaceflight. Her parents, Anson Tyrell and his wife Ruth, led the Tyrell Corporation's expedition toward the Proxima system. The ship turned back about a sixth of the way there, and its automatic systems fed and cared for her on the voyage home. When company workers opened the hatch at San Pedro, she was three years old and the only living person aboard. They carried out her parents' bodies, and her uncle Eldon met her at the ramp and rubbed a lock of her hair between his fingers.

Eldon raised Sarah as his niece and sent her through a series of church boarding schools, where she learned the old Methodist hymns she could quote as an adult. He also made her the model, called a templant in the Tyrell labs, for Rachael, a one-off Nexus-6 replicant built for himself and given some of Sarah's childhood memories. Sarah later told Deckard that her uncle had sexually abused her, and that he had loved her mother, Ruth, who married his brother instead. At one point she cut her wrists in a marble bathroom and wrote her name on the mirror in blood before his doctors and guards broke down the door.

Heir To The Corporation

Sarah was in Zurich in November 2019 when a Nexus-6 replicant killed Eldon in his bedchamber. She returned to Los Angeles, received his ashes at a company ceremony, and ordered his floor sealed exactly as it had been found. She used the urn beside her bed as an ashtray. Company staff then took her through every sector of the headquarters and explained the self-destruct charges that the U.N. had required. That command series answered only to Eldon's voice, so she could not set it off herself. When she reopened his suite, she shut down his trading program and moved the money into an account in her own name.

The Sixth Replicant Scheme

In August 2020, Sarah entered Harry Bryant's police office after Gaff's funeral, accepted a drink from him, and shot him through the heart. Bryant had once briefed Deckard on six escaped replicants but given details for only five, and Sarah built her plan on that mistake. She flew to the Oregon cabin where Deckard was caring for the dying Rachael in a stolen transport sleep module. When he held out his gun and invited her to use it, she knocked it into the woods and told him who she was. After she left, her hired agent Andersson and his team flew Deckard back to Los Angeles.

In her uncle's old office, Sarah played Deckard the police camera tapes of Bryant's briefing and argued that a sixth Nexus-6 was loose in the city. She asked him to find and retire it quietly, before the U.N. could use it as a reason to destroy the Tyrell Corporation. When he refused, she let down her hair, pressed her likeness to Rachael, and made him repeat words he had once spoken to the replicant. Deckard pushed her away, then agreed to take the hunt because it was his fastest route back to Rachael.

Sarah then decided that Isidore, who ran the Van Nuys Pet Hospital and disguised escaped replicants, knew too much, and Andersson killed him for her. She paid Andersson partly with sex, and on the headquarters landing deck she stabbed him in the back with her uncle's folding knife and pushed his body over the parapet. Using a tracker hidden in Dave Holden's artificial heart, she found Deckard at a blade runner safe house in a toppled apartment building. There she shot the motorized copy of Pris that J. F. Sebastian had rebuilt, then gave Deckard a spinner that could not fly beyond the city.

Fall Of Tyrell Headquarters

While Deckard searched, Sarah's security men flew to Oregon, carried the sleep module out of the cabin, and burned the cabin to the ground. They set the module back on the burned floor with its life support switched off. When Deckard reached her suite, he found a woman asleep on the bed and a loaded gun left for him. Sarah spoke from a monitor and admitted there had never been a sixth replicant. She had wanted Deckard, Holden, and the human Roy Batty she had hired to fail and turn on each other, so the U.N. would decide that blade runners could not stop the Nexus-6 models.

Sarah told Deckard that she had wanted to kill Eldon for what he had done to her, and that destroying everything he built was the next best thing. She offered to be for Deckard what she had been for her uncle, and he refused. The U.N. then sent the command series, and the charges brought down the slanted towers and the pyramid of Tyrell Headquarters. Holden pulled Deckard and the woman from the roof in a freight spinner, and Deckard told him that Sarah had died in the blast. The couple later left Earth from San Pedro under the forged name Niemand.

Holden later visited the burned cabin and found Rachael dead in her module. Evidence in the ruins showed that the face on the monitor had been a persynth, a computer-generated copy of Sarah, and that the woman on the bed had been Sarah herself posing as Rachael. On the emigrant ship she quoted a Protestant hymn that Rachael could not have known, and Deckard recognized it. Holden suspected that Deckard had never been fooled at all. The official account listed Sarah among the dead, and the authorities had their own reasons not to question it.

Exile On Mars

Sarah and Deckard lived in a rented hovel in the U.N. transit colony on Mars, where the talking calendar and alarm clock that came with the lease called her Mrs. Niemand. She hated the name and no longer claimed to be Rachael. Deckard hated her, and the two had not touched each other in a long time. The empty Martian surroundings wore down her mind, and she spent whole days in bed and bought two black-market bullets, one for Deckard and one for herself. She planned to shoot him when he came back from his consulting work for Urbenton.

Two men in square glasses like Eldon's, Wycliffe and Zwingli, came to the hovel instead. They served a hidden shadow Tyrell Corporation that had survived the headquarters, and they treated Sarah as its rightful head without knowing she had arranged its destruction. Sarah went with them because the company's money could buy Deckard a better death than a single bullet. She left him a note and one of the bullets, then shot the alarm clock in the corridor with the other. Their yacht carried her to Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, where old interstellar ships had been sunk.

Return To Salander 3

The early star drives had left the sunken transports full of trapped time, and Sarah found that the monitoring dials in St. Magnus's Cathedral were painted fakes. She rode a pressurized shaft down into Salander 3 anyway. Inside, she found her name written in blood on a corridor wall and met a girl of about ten with her face, who gave her name as Rachael. Sarah took the girl for a hallucination built from her own memories. The two of them then watched the ghosts of the voyage play out, and the bloodied figure of her father came looking for Sarah.

In those replayed scenes, Anson had gone mad on the voyage, killed the ship's cat, and cut Ruth's throat while she held her baby. He came to his senses long enough to spare the child and then killed himself. Sarah escaped up the shaft during a storm, and to her anger Wycliffe and Zwingli saw the girl too and took her aboard the yacht. They asked Sarah to go back down for more answers. She demanded a gun, shot both men dead in the yacht's lounge, and set course for Mars with the child.

Death At Outer Hollywood

Back on Mars, Sarah accused Deckard of plotting with the shadow men when he saw and spoke to the girl. She held him at gunpoint and said she would kill herself afterward. Deckard proved he could hear the girl by repeating her words about a pool of blood inside the wreck, then talked Sarah into an embrace, took the gun, and struck her with it before leaving with the child. Urbenton arrived soon after and offered to arrange Deckard's death on camera, with backing from U.N. officials who wanted a new ending for his restaged hunt.

Sarah watched U.N. troopers seize Deckard and the girl in a colony bar, then waited for him on the Los Angeles set aboard the Outer Hollywood station. On the copy of the Bradbury Building roof, she told him she meant to kill him in front of the cameras and then herself. Deckard showed her a photograph that had been hidden in a first-aid kit from Salander 3. It showed Ruth and Anson with newborn twins. He explained that both parents had been replicants and that the girl downstairs was her twin sister, left asleep in the ship's transport chamber.

According to Deckard, Eldon Tyrell had sent the replicant couple beyond the reach of Earth's morphogenetic field to learn whether replicants could have children, and had built a murderous breakdown into Anson to destroy any result. That made the adult Rachael a copy of a copy. Sarah admitted she had known since the wreck that the girl was her sister. She asked Deckard to kiss her the way he had kissed Rachael, and while he held her she shot herself through the temple. Deckard left her body on the set and took the child, Rachael, away from the station.

Behind The Scenes

K. W. Jeter created Sarah for his first authorized sequel, which Bantam Spectra published in October 1995, and finished her story in the October 1996 follow-up. She grew out of a line in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, where Deckard told Rachael that her memories belonged to Tyrell's niece. The film never showed that niece. Jeter made her the templant for Rachael and Eldon's heir in the first novel, then rewrote her in the second as the replicant-born twin of a sleeping girl named Rachael.

The novels treat the different cuts of the 1982 film as one continuity. Deckard and Rachael's flight north follows the theatrical ending, while Sarah's sixth replicant came from Bryant's line about six escapees in the original release, a gap left when the character Mary was cut. The Final Cut later changed that line so that two replicants died in the electrical field. Jeter also wrote that Pris had been a human who believed she was a replicant, and that the Roy Batty Sarah hired was the human templant for the replicant.

Blade Runner 2049 ignored all three Jeter novels. In that film Rachael bore Deckard's child and died in 2021, and Tyrell's niece never appeared. Jeter's last sequel, Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon, does not name Sarah either. Its blade runner, Iris Knaught, has the face later matched to Rachael, and a sleeping Rachael lies in a desert lab. Replicant Night left open who took the child Rachael out of the transport chamber ten years before Sarah's visit, though Deckard suggested Eldon might have ordered it.

Conclusion

Sarah Tyrell was Eldon Tyrell's heir and the living model for Rachael in K. W. Jeter's Blade Runner sequels. She killed Bryant and Andersson, used a false sixth replicant to steer Deckard and the U.N., and had the Tyrell headquarters destroyed while she was listed among the dead. She spent her exile on Mars as Mrs. Niemand. At Scapa Flow she found the twin she had never known, and on the Outer Hollywood rooftop she learned that she had been born to replicants. She shot herself in Deckard's arms.